Offering computing services often requires coordination and communication between processes operating on multiple computing systems. For example, load balancers may require communication between processes executing on separate network systems (e.g. two web servers, or a client and a web server, etc.).
To assist in communication, some enterprises use IP networking protocols to transfer information between resident applications running on these computing systems. For example, one process on one computing system may open a TCP socket with another process executing on a second computing system to transport information between processes. This functionality allows communication to flow freely over the network between two processes associated with the TCP connection.